Authors: Alexa Land
Tags: #romance, #gay, #love story, #mm, #gay romance, #gay fiction, #malemale, #lbgt
Belonging
Belonging
by Alexa Land
A M/M Love Story
Book Eight in the Firsts and
Forever Series
Copyright 2015 by Alexa
Land.
All rights reserved. No
reproduction, copy or transmission in whole or in part of this
publication is permitted without express written consent from the
author.
This is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, places and incidents are either used
fictitiously or are the product of the author’s imagination. Any
resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, business
establishments or locales is purely coincidental.
This book contains sexually
explicit material.
It is intended for ADULTS
ONLY.
Books by Alexa Land
Include:
Feral (prequel to Tinder)
The Tinder Chronicles (Tinder, Hunted
and Destined)
And the Firsts and Forever
Series:
Way Off Plan
All In
In Pieces
Gathering Storm
Salvation
Skye Blue
Against the Wall
Belonging
Can two damaged men build a future
together from the shattered pieces of their lives?
Gianni Dombruso’s life was altered
forever at the age of four, when his parents were murdered and he
and his brothers went to live with their grandmother, the
irrepressible Nana Dombruso. Now almost thirty, Gianni has spent
his life bouncing from relationship to relationship, seeking but
never finding the security and stability he so desperately
craves.
Alexzander Tillane was one of the
biggest pop stars in the world when he walked away from it all in
the middle of a concert in 2002. Almost destroyed by the pressure
of fame, Zan retreated to a life of quiet solitude in an effort to
heal. But the cure backfired, leaving him with more issues than
answers.
Zan knows he can’t give Gianni the
stability he’s looking for, not with all his problems. He can’t
even imagine why the beautiful younger man would want to get
involved with someone so damaged, but the heat between them can’t
be ignored. Giving in to it could be a huge mistake. Or maybe both
men might end up right where they belong.
Dedicated to
Bec and Ky, with
love
Table of Contents
Chapter
One
My family was completely insane, every
last one of them.
I sighed as I watched my brother
Vincent out in my grandmother’s backyard, methodically trimming the
hedges. A wide central path was lined on both sides by two dozen
Italian cypress trees shaped into tidy columns, each offset by a
pair of low shrubs. Until that morning, the shrubs had been square.
But Nana had decided she’d like them better if they were round, so
my brother was out there doing as she asked.
“Dude! Cocks and balls, as far as the
eye can see. Epic!” I turned to look at Jessie. The slim blond was
holding a coffee cup and wearing flannel pajamas with a repeating
pattern of bacon and eggs all over them.
“Good to know I’m not the only one
seeing that.”
“Twin rows of ten-foot-tall boners?
Pretty hard to miss.”
I followed him out of the sun porch
and back into the kitchen as I asked, “Are you living here now?” My
grandmother had hired Jessie as her chauffeur and assistant a few
months ago. As far as I could tell, his only qualifications were
that he was cute, young and gay. Nana had a habit of collecting
people who fit those criteria.
“For now. My apartment building is
having a few issues, so Nana offered me one of her spare bedrooms
until the situation is resolved.”
“Define
issues
.”
“You know that movie
Arachnophobia? It was kind of like that. Only with ants.
Lots
of ants. And by
lots I mean huge, reaming buttloads. One ant? No problem. Two,
three ants? Still fine. But dude, it was like an ant tsunami. No,
more than that. It was like...like the antpocalypse.”
“The antpocalyse,” I repeated as I
raised an eyebrow at him.
He nodded. “It was so damn creepy. I’m
still having ant-induced flashbacks. It was like living in an
ant-based horror movie. I swear, those little fuckers were
organizing. Mrs. Schumacher in three-thirteen? Her poodle went
missing. I swear it was the ants. There’s no way to prove it, but
mark my words. Someday they’re going to go in and excavate the
giant mutant ant hill underneath my building and find Elmo’s pink,
sparkly collar and just one little tuft of poodle fur. Poor
Elmo.”
“Why did a dog named Elmo have a pink
collar?”
“Don’t judge him.” I stared at Jessie
for a long moment, and he flashed me a smile.
My cousin Nico rushed into the kitchen
and threw open a cupboard as he said, “Morning, Gianni and Jessie.
Anyone know if there’s a travel mug around here?” His button-down
shirt looked like he’d slept in it, and his normally perfect black
hair was flattened on one side.
“Rough night last night, Cuz?” I found
a stainless steel cup and filled it for him, then popped on a
lid.
“Oh yeah,” he said, adjusting his
glasses as he took the mug from me. “I had to force myself through
two hundred pages of my comparative constitutional law textbook for
class this morning.” He took a sip and said, “Oh man, that’s good.
Thanks.”
“You hate law school. You know this,
right?”
“I do, in fact, know this, but it’s a
necessary evil if I want to be a lawyer,” Nico said. He took
another long drink of coffee before saying, “Gotta go, I’m
late.”
“You really should examine your
lifestyle choices,” I told him as he hurried from the room. “You’re
not nearly douchey enough to be a lawyer.”
“I’m pretty sure the douche
enhancement curriculum begins next semester,” he called. A few
moments later, the front door opened, then closed behind
him.
Jessie plucked a blueberry muffin from
a basket on the kitchen island and hopped up on the counter. “Your
cousin seems like an interesting guy,” he said. “And by
interesting, I mean smoking hot. What’s his story?”
“Who says he has one?” I hedged as I
filled the tea kettle and put it on the stove.
“Oh, he has a story,” my grandmother
announced as she breezed into the kitchen. She was wearing a
camouflage track suit, for reasons I couldn’t begin to guess. “That
poor little cutie pie! He had his heart broken but good. His
boyfriend cheated on him with Nico’s best friend. They were living
in Los Angeles, and Nicky walked away from his whole life when he
found out. I took him in, of course. Now he’s trying to move on and
make a future for himself apart from that slimeball of an ex. I
think he’s way off base with this law school thing, his heart’s not
really in it. He needs to figure that out for himself,
though.”
“That’s Nico’s private business,
Nana,” I told her. “I don’t think he wants us talking about this
stuff.”
She waved her hand and said, “Bah!
Jessie’s family, and family doesn’t keep secrets from each other.”
The chauffeur grinned at her as I suppressed a sigh. Nana changed
the subject as she headed to the sun porch. “Now let’s see how your
brother’s coming on my backyard redesign.”
“Wait for it,” Jessie whispered, then
winked at me and tossed a bit of muffin in his mouth.
“Sweet baby Jesus!” Nana exclaimed.
“Look at all those wienie dongles!”
I leaned over and glanced through the
doorway. My brother had just finished the final hedge and turned to
look back at his handiwork. Jessie hopped off the counter, pulled a
phone from his pajama pocket and zoomed in on Vincent. He snapped a
photo and chuckled as my usually stoic brother’s eyes went wide and
his mouth fell open. “How did Vinnie not realize he was carving
giant balls until just that moment?” he asked as he zoomed out and
took another picture.
“That’s so him. He was probably
totally focused on getting every sphere perfect and symmetrical, so
he failed to see the giant balls right in his face. I need a copy
of those photos, by the way,” I told him as Nana scurried out the
back door.
“You got it.” As he shot them to me in
a text message, he murmured, “I love being a part of this
family.”
“Don’t you have a real family of tiny,
blond, pseudo-Nordic people somewhere?”
“Yes and no,” he said. “My father’s a
Baptist minister. How thrilled do you suppose he was when he found
out his kid was queer?”
“Oh. Well, shit.”
“I’d better go get dressed, Nana will
probably want to head out soon. But let me leave you with this
parting thought. What the song says? It’s totally true. The only
guy that could really stretch you is the son of a preacher man.” He
gave me a lascivious smile and wiggled his eyebrows at me before
scooping up his mug and sauntering from the kitchen.
It took me a moment to absorb that,
and then I yelled after him, “Reach! Not stretch! What’s that even
supposed to mean?”
“Come to my room tonight if you want
to find out,” he called before disappearing up the
stairs.
“Because this family needed more
crazy,” I muttered.
After doctoring up a travel mug of
tea, I took one more look out the window. Nana and my brother were
standing side by side. They’d struck identical poses, hands on
their hips and heads tilted as they contemplated Cockhenge. I
chuckled as I headed to the garage. Okay, so sometimes the crazy
was pretty entertaining.
*****
When I met my friend Yoshiro at the
gym twenty minutes later, he greeted me like he always did. “You’re
late.”
“By four minutes. You’re oddly uptight
about punctuality, Yosh. You know that, right?”
“I wouldn’t be if you weren’t always
late.” He pulled off his sweatshirt, then quickly brushed his long
bangs out of his dark eyes. When he did that, I noticed he’d added
more details to the incredibly intricate black tattoo of a
miniature city that sleeved his left forearm. My friend was a
tattoo artist and tended to take his work home with him. He’d
actually been a fairly nerdy business major when we met in college,
and he’d ended up using those skills to run his own tattoo studio.
The way he’d evolved in the nine years I’d known him never ceased
to amaze me.
“I’m not always late.”
“You are! And always by four
minutes.”
“So maybe we should change our
workouts to nine-oh-four. Then would you be happy?”
